


Rows

by Antosha



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Hedwig (Harry Potter) rocks, Post-Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Teen Angst, Teen Romance, little whinging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:54:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24024646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antosha/pseuds/Antosha
Summary: Ginny and Harry: Too much time. Not enough time. (Written pre-DH)
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	Rows

So many Muggles.

Ginny’s forehead pressed against the glass of the train as she gazed at the suburban sprawl spinning past. Row after row of houses flashed by—brick, most of them, and indistinguishable. She remembered her first trip on the Hogwarts’ Express, laughing with Luna at the way that the lines of trees in an orchard that they passed seemed to rotate like spokes on a wheel.

All the while, trying not to think that she had done something to keep Harry and Ron from coming to the train. Trying not to worry about them.

Git.

This didn’t have any of that magic. For all that it was bustling, there was something empty about this landscape, its row houses and pocket parks and schoolyards with rusting swings, and it made Ginny sad.

Not that she needed the help.

Hermione, of course, had told her to go. _He needs to see you_ , she’d said. _You need to talk to each other and the wedding won’t work_. And she’d arranged for Ginny to visit her at the Grangers’ Bayswater flat – supposedly doing some last-minute shopping before the big event – the day before the Weasley family headed over to Lyons. Mum had been happy enough to have her gone, mad as she was with preparations for the trip to France, so Ginny had Floo’d down the night before. And they’d both cried a lot over takeaway curry and Italian wine and denounced all boys as gits and blackguards. Well, Hermione had said blackguards. Ginny had used a much shorter, older word.

Then, in the morning, Hermione had waited until her parents were busy in their surgery—having told them they’d be seeing the sights that day—had dragged Ginny down to Victoria Station, a timetable in her hand, and had gently but emphatically shoved Ginny onto the appropriate South West Line train.

And here Ginny was, watching London turn into Surrey, and wondering why anyone would want to live here when they could live in Ottery St. Catchpole. Or London, for that matter.

The train slowed, pulling into a station. Ginny checked against the map on the bulkhead. Two more stops.

“Going far?”

Ginny started.

A boy was sitting just below the railway map, dark-haired and pale. Well, a man really—a little older than the twins, perhaps. He smiled apologetically.

“Great Whinging,” Ginny answered, having no reason not to.

“Nah, you sound perfectly happy to me.” When Ginny gave him her best ‘stupid-boy’ scowl, he just smiled. “Sorry. Old joke. It’s right after Virginia Water. Just another twenty minutes or so.”

Ginny nodded. A woman struggled by, a baby on one hip and a fold-up pram on the other.

“Going to see a boyfriend?” the dark-haired boy-man asked.

Ginny held in a groan. There’d been a reason not to answer him after all. Boys. Gits and blackguards. “Yes, I am. We haven’t been able to see each other since the summer hols started.”

Nodding, the boy said, “I thought. You’ve been staring out that window, looking as full of excitement and dread as I feel.”

In spite of herself, Ginny arched an eyebrow.

The boy laughed, a short, sad bark. “Yeah, I thought so.”

“Are you going to visit your girlfriend?” Ginny asked, figuring it was both the logical question, and one that would give him one more reason not to flirt with her.

He shrugged. “Going to see if I still have one.” His dark brown eyes flicked down to the battered book in his lap.

“Oh,” Ginny murmured. She really didn’t want to know, didn’t want to hear his tale of woe, and yet something about this boy, this man, seemed like he might hold a key. To something. When he looked back up, she held his gaze. “What did you do?”

Again, the sad, barking laugh. “Nothing romantic. No big rows. No affairs with other girls. I just...” He grunted and looked up the aisle. “Look, if I... If a boy broke it off with you, and then came crawling back, would you take him?”

A frisson of nausea fluttered through Ginny’s middle. Here she was the one... “That depends. Why did you break it off?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Well...” He looked down into his lap again. “She deserves better than me. That’s why. I’m...” Squeezing his eyes closed, he muttered, “I’m sick, see? I’m dying.” He glanced up and took in her shock. “Nothing catching, I promise! It’s cancer. And I might have ten years, or I might have ten months.”

“Oh,” Ginny said.

“After I found out, I just...” He shrugged. “I just thought she deserved better than me.”

Again, Ginny forced down her rising gorge. “Did you ask her what she thought?”

The boy shook his head and gave a sad grin. “’Course not. Didn’t give her the chance, did I? Told her on the phone and just hung up. And now she won’t answer my calls.”

“So you’re going to tell her you were wrong?”

“Yeah.” He peered at her, clearing trying to gauge Ginny’s reaction.

 _Poor bugger_. “Well, I don’t know. How badly do you want to be with her?”

His eyes shone bright. He didn’t answer.

“If it was me, I’d understand, but I’d still want to kill you.”

He looked away from her and out of the window to where greenery was now flashing by. Ginny hadn’t even noticed that they’d started again.

She reached across the aisle and touched his forearm, evoking a shiver. “So if you want her, let her know she can kill you if she wants, but you don’t care, you know? That you still love her.”

Nodding, he wiped his nose. “Thanks.”

Ginny nodded.

They rode in silence. Too soon, they were pulling into another station. “You’re the next stop after,” he said.

She nodded again. Leaning back, she watched as their train slowed to a halt. In a carriage on the opposite track, a young girl was crying disconsolately in her mother’s arms.

“You sound like you’re speaking from experience,” said the boy.

She locked eyes with him. She couldn’t say it.

Nodding, he stood. “My stop. Wish me luck.”

“Good luck.”

With a wave, he smiled and walked down the aisle. “You, too.”

It occurred to Ginny, as she watched him shuffling off of the train and onto the platform, that she would likely never see this man again, even if he got his ten years. She was surprised by how much she hoped that he did get them.

Too many Muggles.

***

One hundred and sixty eight hours. Seven days. One week exactly since Harry had left his friends at King's Cross, and already he was starting to crack.

The ride back had been hard enough: Luna reading, Ron and Hermione patrolling the corridors to make sure that there wasn't any trouble, and — Hermione admitted — consoling the younger children, who were crying each other sick.

Neville tried to talk, to start a game of chess, but Harry couldn't do it. His whole being was focused on holding himself back from apologizing to Ginny.

Ginny, who sat opposite him, staring out the window like some red-haired marble. Her face was free of emotion — of anger, in any case. But she would not speak with him, and he had thought he would go mad.

 _But she understood_ , Harry told himself for the six hundred and seventy-second time. _She had expected me to back away for her safety's sake. I don't need to apologize._

He was certain it was the right thing to do, giving up his best source of comfort. And she had agreed.

Then why was it so bloody hard? He had meant to use these last days at Privet Drive to come to some kind of understanding with the Dursleys. He didn't want to hate them any more. He had also meant to read up on Curse-Breaking and dealing with magical objects.

Instead, Harry had spent every waking moment (and, he suspected, many of his sleeping moments as well) fighting the urge to send Hedwig to her with a long letter retracting the whole bloody thing and begging her to take him back, to come with him. To look at him again with that look that made him feel that he could and would do anything, so long as she was happy.

But in order for her to be happy, she needed to be alive, she needed to be safe. And sending her owls, kissing her, flinging himself at her feet — these things definitely would not keep her safe.

From her cage by his desk, Hedwig hooted. Her expression carried the message perfectly: "Send her a mouse, idiot fledgling, and get it over with."

He threw himself down in a miserable heap on his bed. Another one hundred and sixty eight hours and the wedding would be over. He would be of age, and ready to go Horcrux hunting. He had thought that the worst part would be having to protect her feelings while he was at the wedding, but he'd realized days ago that the feelings that were going to be in turmoil would be his own.

He wasn't even sure if he could make it another week. Seven days. One hundred and sixty eight hours.

Her face, blazing. Her small, smooth lips against his own dry ones. Against his throat. With a groan, he picked up one of the tomes that Hermione had 'borrowed' for him from the Restricted Section and buried his head underneath it.

Ron had owled once—asking what had happened with Ginny, and did Harry think maybe it would be okay if Ron asked Hermione out on a date? A date. What was interesting was that the twit hadn’t bothered to ask whether Harry thought Hermione would mind. Which Harry was sure she wouldn’t.

Hermione had called three times, once to ask how Harry was, and twice to tell him, very firmly, that he needed to send Ginny an owl and Talk Some Things Out. Oh, and would Harry mind much if perhaps she and Ron possibly began to see a little more of each other, if that wasn’t a problem? Which it wasn’t.

Harry flung the book off of his head. He could see how this search for the Horcruxes was going to go: Harry miserably thinking about Ginny, and Ron and Hermione madly trying to find dark corners to snog in. Brilliant.

***

Walking past dozens of indistinguishable, pastel-colored Little Whinging houses, Ginny found her inner sense of dread growing. What was she doing here? Why hadn’t she been able simply to live up to the agreement that they’d made at Professor Dumbledore’s funeral? She’d have had her chance to see him in just another day, on the way to Bill and Fleur’s wedding.

But she couldn’t wait. Not any more.

For the past week, she’d played the good girl. Brave, Funny Ginny Weasley. But the fact of the matter was that Brave, Funny Ginny Weasley was a mask that she couldn’t keep up any more. Those five weeks of being with Harry this spring had shattered the self-assured pretense that she’d built up around herself since her first year of school, and she was back to the blushing, uncertain idiot who had squeaked when the Boy Who Lived had appeared out of nowhere in her kitchen that August morning.

He had been her birthday wish. She had closed her eyes, crossed her fingers and prayed that her brother’s best friend would come and fall in love with her.

Well, he had come. He hadn’t fallen in love. Not then, anyway.

And that was the worm that gnawed at her, destroying her trust that things would work out.

What did Harry feel for her? It was impossible to guess; he made her brothers look emotionally literate. Hermione swore up and down that Harry’s sun rose and set on Ginny, but, though she might be Harry’s best friend as well as a genius, Hermione’s own understanding of boys and their feelings wasn’t always exactly brilliant. Look at how she’d completely misread Ron. Not that Ron had helped.

Not that Ginny herself had helped. When she’d lashed out at her brother, it had been in part out of humiliation at his accusations, and in part out of discomfort at the intense, burning stare that Harry was giving her. Together they had set her off like sparks to dry tinder. What she hadn’t meant was for Ron to go and snog Lavender. Idiot.

That burning look of Harry’s had been her first clue. The burning look and her own discomfort at being its target. But Harry had never come out and said, “I love you,” or even, “Let’s have some laughs together,” the way Dean had. The closest he’d got to telling her what it was he did or didn’t feel for her was at that awful funeral, and then it had been to say that their time together had felt like someone else’s life. What the hell did that mean?

There had been times when he’d lain, his head in her lap, looking up at her, those green eyes stripping her naked. Her soul, naked. Not her body. Well, not just her body. And yet he had seemed so happy, so pleased with whatever it was that he saw.

Bugger. Bloody hell.

She was the same idiot she had been at eleven. Wishing on a bloody candle.

Privet Drive.

The street looked just like every other street in the entire bloody village. The houses were square, pale and utterly lacking in personality. Every window was closed, and all of the shades pulled tight. Manicured lawns and gaudy flowerbeds. Other than a few cats— all of which oddly seemed to have some Kneazle ancestry— there wasn’t a living creature sharing the mid-day sidewalk with Ginny.

It was everything the Burrow was not, and Ginny hated it. Hated that Harry Potter— _her_ Harry Potter—had had to grow up in such a sterile hellhole.

Number four was the second house on the left, a mint green that managed even so to look bland.

Ginny stood at the bottom of the walk and suffered one last crisis of nerve. Would he be happy to see her? Would he be angry? Would he yell at her? Here he’d told her to stay away—he wasn’t likely to be pleased that she’d invaded his family prison.

Ginny tried to tell herself to walk away. If Harry yelled at her, she knew herself too well to think that she’d take it quietly. They’d row, and that would tear her apart and distract him, just when he needed distraction least. She’d seen the house. She’d been close to him—she could feel him nearby, as if he were one of the lodestones that Professor Flitwick liked to play with, and she were nothing more than a shapeless, directionless pile of iron shavings following him around.

But that wasn’t true. She did have a direction. She did have desire, and it was aimed at him, and she couldn’t take this any more.

Before she had the time to freeze again, Ginny strode up the walk and knocked firmly on the door.

She had hoped that Harry would be alone in the house, that he would be the one to welcome her into his aunt and uncle’s house. Or not welcome her.

But when the door pulled open, the face in the crack was that of a bony, horse-faced woman. Harry’s aunt. “Yes?” the woman said, suspicious.

“Mrs. Dursley?” The woman’s eyes narrowed even further. “My name…” Ginny didn’t want to mention her last name, knowing that every encounter Harry’s aunt had had with Ginny’s family had been a disaster. “I’m Ginny. I’m a friend of Harry’s. May I speak to him?”

The woman’s face dropped, making it even longer. She stared at Ginny open-mouthed for a moment, and then scanned her from head to foot. After a small eternity of silence, Petunia Dursley shook herself and opened the door. “Of course. Please, come in.”

This wasn’t at all what Ginny had expected. She’d anticipated having to throw rocks at Harry’s window. “Thank you.”

Harry’s aunt continued to stare at Ginny as she came into the entryway. Frankly, she looked as if she’d seen a ghost, and not necessarily one that she was used to having visit.

Struggling for calm, Ginny asked, “Would you like me to wait here? Would you like to let him know that I’m here, or—”

With a blink, the woman snapped to again. “Harry is in his room. You’re Ginny _Weasley_ , are you?”

 _Oh, dear_. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Ah.” Lips pursed, the woman muttered, “I should have known... I think it best if you went up yourself, Miss Weasley. I think that Harry would like that best.” She pointed up the stair beside her. Behind her would be the cupboard...

Curiouser and curiouser. Nodding, Ginny began to ascend the stair when she felt a bony hand on her shoulder.

“He has spoken about you, Miss Weasley. He has... missed you.” The woman’s dry face seemed at war with itself, as if speaking to Ginny were the last thing she wanted to do, and yet she felt compelled to do it any way. “I am sure that he has told you much about us. Please do not judge us too harshly. We did not...” For a moment, Mrs. Dursley seemed to win the fight over control of her tongue, only to lose it again. “Has he ever shown you a picture of his mother, my sister?”

Not certain that the woman wasn’t barking mad, Ginny shook her head.

“Hmmm. Do get him to do that. Miss Weasley. Ginny.” She began to turn away, her hand trembling as it brushed at non-existent lint on her apron. “Oh, and do tell my nephew that lunch will be ready at 1:00. I hope you will join us.” Jerkily, Petunia walked back along the hallway towards what Ginny supposed was the kitchen.

Ginny discovered as the woman strode away that her heart was racing. _What was that?_ Shaking her head, she walked up the stairs. _Now, which door...?_

But Ginny didn’t need any help figuring out which room was Harry’s. Locks. Cat flap. Horrible.

 _Hi, Harry. Hey there, Harry. Look, Harry, I know you said we shouldn’t be involved any more, but sod that. And besides, boys don’t_ get _to break it off with me, so why don’t you just hold still while I punch you in the nose..._

She raised a tremulous hand.

***

There was a quiet knock at Harry’s door. With a sigh, he got up. In point of fact, Aunt Petunia had been a totally different woman since Harry’s return. She had talked to him about his mother, had shown him the letter that Dumbledore had left all those years ago, along with the blanket that he had been swaddled in. She had cried when she found out that Dumbledore had died. Expecting that she must have come to call him down to lunch, Harry opened the door.

It wasn't Harry's aunt. It was Ginny.

She looked awful. "Hello, Harry," she said, her eyes locked on his chest. Her face was pale and she was wearing a threadbare jumper that Harry realized with a start was one of his castoffs. The green made her hair blaze all the more fiercely.

"G-Ginny," he said, somehow surprised though he had thought of nothing else but her for a whole week. One hundred and sixty eight hours. "W-what...?"

Her eyes flicked up and bore into his, and a creature clawed inside of Harry— not the cold, scaly one that he had fought down while watching her with Dean, nor the flaming, roaring one that possessed him when she was in his arms. This one was desperate, and feathered, and felt like something that Harry could not control. Ginny swallowed and spoke. "I couldn't do it, Harry. I couldn't wait."

And like a prisoner embracing his fate, Harry threw his arms around Ginny, wordlessly unsaying all that he had said, welcoming the eternity that was theirs.

Not matter how few the hours.

***

Hedwig watched as her boy and his mate preened and courted there on his nest. She was pleased with Ginevra Molly (Ginny) Weasley of the Burrow, Ottery St Catchpole, Devonshire. The hawk-plumed girl had seen what needed to be done and had done it. She’d even given Hedwig’s boy the nips that he so richly deserved for his idiocy.

Hedwig’s boy did not seem to mind.

They would be nesting together soon. In fact, Hedwig realized – as she watched their mutual preening progress rather further than she had ever seen it do – if they continued, they might be nesting rather _too_ soon. She gave a warning hoot. The couple broke apart and laughed.

Time for nesting later, when things were more secure. When the serpents had been slain and the nest could be kept safe.

Her boy and his mate would have pretty nestlings, Hedwig thought. She fluffed herself contentedly as she watched them return to their preening.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: This fic was originally two separate fics (“Rows” and “168”) written for different challenges at the HPGW_OTP LJ community. I realized that they dovetailed well and presented them as companion pieces elsewhere. However, when I submitted it to Phoenix Song, my wonderful beta, Sherylyn, made the brilliant suggestion of folding the two chapters into one. I want to thank her and my amazing pre-beta, aberforths_rug, for their invaluable assistance.


End file.
